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Somewhat sad news.  Chess champion Bobby Fischer is dead.  The story of his life is one of great triumph followed by great tragedy:

Fisher went on to become a bizarre, shadowy figure (hence the irony of the title of the 1993 movie about a child chess prodigy, Searching for Bobby Fischer). Over the years, his eccentricity seemed to blossom into full-blown madness as he railed against the United States, went on anti-Semitic tirades (although his mother was Jewish) and was essentially in exile from the U.S. after breaking sanctions by playing a match in Yugoslavia.

Too often, in the world of competitions, a person reaches the pinnacle of his or her life at a very young age. And nothing after that can ever match what they did at age 30 or 25 or even 18. That’s tough. But if they handle the reality with grace and intelligence, what they did in their youth can be a springboard. In the case of Fischer, who was on top of the world at age 29, it didn’t have to work out the way it did. Chess isn’t that kind of game. You can be superb for years. In fact, Fischer was. But there were other things going on — invisible demons is the best way to put it, I guess — that contributed to making him a victim of his own early phenomenal success.

Long, long before the end, Bobby Fischer had lost himself, never to be found again.

I find the contrast between Fischer and a later American chess champion Josh Waitzkin to be fascinating. Josh Waitzkin was the subject of the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer and also had his problems with early chess celebrity.  But unlike Fischer, Waitzkin is very well-adjusted and a lot less eccentric.  He has given up chess, but is now a world champion martial artist and author.

This story reminded me of this piece, where I talked about how loving something motivates you to master it, but mastering it too well, or solving the mystery, causes you to stop loving it.  I called it the Mystery/Mastery paradox.  You have to mentally reframe the challenge in order to stay engaged.  Like once you figure out a game inside out, you change your focus to beating other masters of the game to stay engaged.  Once you beat the other masters of the game, you may focus on spreading your fame or writing books about the game.  It’s still about the original game, but only tangentially.  I think this is what led Michael Jordan to try baseball for a while.

I don’t know much about Bobby Fischer’s life, but maybe he didn’t cultivate anything besides chess.  From what I know, it was an all-consuming passion for him from a very young age.  Maybe when he fell into his own mystery/mastery paradox and it stopped being fun for him, he had no other outlet to switch to, because being so consumed with chess from so young never allowed him to figure out his identity outside of chess.

At some point, however, it seems Josh Waitzkin did figure out his identity outside of chess.  He explains it in this NY1 profile he did:

About ten years ago, to escape the phenomenon of, “Hey, you’re the ‘Searching for Bobby Fischer’ guy!” he spent a year living in Slovenia and traveling around Europe.

And he came to a realization.

“Transitional moments were affecting me in chess and in life. And when I took them on in one, it helped me with the other,” said Waitzkin. “And so that became my manner of studying of chess, which was to look at my psychological being was manifesting itself over the board. So that kind of led to this way of thinking about chess, life, tai chi, the martial arts, in a manner which was basically looking for thematic interconnections, as opposed to looking at one art at a time.”…

“I didn’t grow up learning chess or competing in a protected environment,” says Waitzkin. “I grew up kind of in a raw environment and that’s been kind of central to my life in all these things, because life as a competitor is brutal.”….

“It caught up to me, and I started to become externalized through the chess, which was very sad, very sad,” says Waitzkin. “When you’re defined by something from the age of six on, the idea of letting that go and redefining yourself completely, it’s naked and raw and terrifying.”

But the transition was eased when the Columbia University graduate discovered tai chi, and his new passion resulted in an international championship in 2004.

Now his goal is to use these two parts of his life to create a multi-disciplinary learning center for kids.

So he went from competitive chess to martial arts champion. And note how, as he masters martial arts, he already sets up his next challenge, his plan for a multi-disciplinary learning center for kids. I think this technique he has of setting up his next challenge ahead of time shows how he’s able to avoid the mystery/mastery paradox. He realizes when he’s falling out of love with something and as he masters it, he sets up the next challenge for himself.

I also think that’s why celebrities like Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, and of course Bobby Fischer go insane once they achieve their goals. They only focus on mastering one thing, and once they achieve it and naturally start to fall out of love with it and it just becomes a grinding job or crushing responsibility, they have nothing else to channel their energy into. They hate what their doing, but they also love the security blanket of knowing they have an area they have mastered and are afraid to leave it behind despite how unfulfilling it has now become.

Not being prepared to channel your energies into something else is also what I think contributes to the alcoholism of the guy in this story who turned his hobby into a job, along with other people who turned to substance abuse after they turned their passion into a career and hit the top. The problem wasn’t turning their passion or hobby into a career, it was not being prepared for what the void that would come up once they mastered that hobby (doing something for a living is the ultimate form of mastery I think). They became victims of the mystery/mastery paradox.

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